20

SCANDI NOIR

The ten books in the series The Story of a Crime by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have been printed and reprinted, turned into films and then remakes, and all in all have created an image of a Sweden glimmering with dark self-criticism. The authors are celebrated for crime stories where the Swedish zeitgeist, as well as the welfare state, are dissected, thereby laying the foundation for the genre called Scandi Noir. The ten books about inspector Martin Beck, Gunvald Larsson, and the others have become an unlikely success. In their footsteps, a new generation of Swedish crime writers followed, like Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, each with millions of copies sold worldwide.

The fact that the duo Sjöwall and Wahlöö ushered in a new kind of social criticism to the crime genre is not news, on the contrary. That was the plan. Quoting Per Wahlöö, from 1967:

Using the crime novel as a scalpel to cut up a society which is ideologically depleted and morally debatable — the so-called welfare society of a bourgeois nature — and simply find out who is responsible for what, and if there is anything left to be responsible for.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö appear increasingly disillusioned with each book they wrote. The cracks in the state’s structure were all noted, their depths measured and shadows outlined. Something in Sweden was broken.

Even if the first three books in the series were slightly milder in their criticism, the following seven left no doubts in any reader’s mind. In The Laughing Policeman from 1968, they mock the consumer society. The following year, they criticise Swedish immigration and integration policies in The Fire Engine that Disappeared. In Murder at the Savoy, the police authority itself is scorned; centralisation puts the authorities at a far remove from the citizenry, and a continuous theme is the idea that the elite protects itself. The Locked Room from 1972 deals with old people’s care, and so on. To put it simply, things were better in the old days, in their eyes.

Once, there was another country, which now is almost lost. Here and there, the writers add elements of discrepancy in order to heighten the grade of contrast of the black-and-white image of Sweden. One example is the character Herrgott Nöjd, a village policeman in the south of Sweden. His name could be translated into Mr-Good-and-Happy, a not very subtle contrast to the anonymous contemporary society with its multi-storey carparks and high suicide rates.

Major changes in the physical environment took place during Sweden’s post-war era. Motoring increased, energy consumption increased, garbage mountains grew. Increasing pollution in the water and air was given great attention. Up until the mid-1960s, the politics of welfare had been focused on eliminating the problems of the old society by improving housing standards and expanding social welfare. Now, environmental issues became a crucial point of criticism towards the current system. Both Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were initially members of one of the several Swedish political groups trading under the name Communist Party (the SKP) before, in 1967, joining another, the Left Party Communists (VPK). In their crime novels, they took their Marxist ideology and examined the reality behind the housing estates and institutions of the welfare state. The image of a large-scale, centralised society emerges, where crimes are no longer discrete events in an otherwise calm world but are instead a normalised part of a brutal everyday life, and where the police no longer provide security but are an integral part of a society that is deteriorating from within.

When the middle class became much larger as a result of economic growth, with higher wages combined with an equalisation of income, it became dominant in both a political and cultural sense. As a result, a self-image emerged in which the Swedes lived in a homogeneous society. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, being part of the radical left, were strongly critical of the Social Democrats who had created this middle class at the expense of the workers. For instance, as a result, women were still oppressed — something even the good-natured Mr-Good-and-Happy considered a problem. In Cop Killer from 1974 he says, ‘And I’ve always regarded women as regular people, essentially no different from me and men in general … I’ve read a number of books and articles on women’s lib, but most of it is nonsense. And the part that isn’t nonsense is so obvious a Hottentot could understand it. Equal pay for equal work, for example, and sex discrimination.’

Perhaps Sjöwall and Wahlöö based their writing on the idea that the folkhem, the Swedish people’s home, was unbreakable? Or were they really two revolutionaries who wanted to tear it all down in order to make place for a new order? Whatever the case, one can sum up their criticism in three words: disgust with modernity.

Their Scandi Noir style has since provided a blueprint for literary success; social awareness and criticism of the hypocrisy in society have become essential elements of today’s crime fiction. Or should one say clichés? Whatever the case, it seems the world can’t get enough of the bright Swedish model being ripped to pieces and found to be full of pain and darkness. Their series of ten novels have re-drawn the map of Sweden from moral template into crisis chart. And their way of thinking has been amplified beyond the pages of their books. The small-scale folkhem is still set against the mighty welfare state. Idyll against monolith. Public trust against corruption. Ordinary people against the elite. Domestic against foreign. Past against present.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s leftist dystopia has become an established image of Sweden in some circles, perhaps even a cultural heritage that now is turned into politics by the right-wing populist party in the same way their representatives dress in Swedish folk costume. Politics based on nostalgia. It used to be so much better in the olden days.